Relatively thin, soft packaging material such as cellophane, polypropylene, etc., is conventionally used to package many products such as cigarettes and the like. To facilitate the use of automatic packaging equipment, the packaging material is usually supplied in the form of a web which moves from a storage reel, on which the web is spooled, along a predetermined path to the packaging equipment in accordance with the operation of a feed roller. When the reel becomes empty, the web in a replacement reel is fed, usually by hand, into the feed roller, so that the operation of the packaging equipment can continue.
As the speed of packaging equipment increases, and as the equipment becomes more complex, the frequency of reel replacement also increases as does the difficulty in making a manual replacement of the web. Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a new and improved apparatus for automatically replacing a web used in automatic packaging equipment.